Wong Shakes It Despite Controversy

Dr. Wong contemplating what moves he is going to bust out on Friday. Photo by Erica Marquez / Xpress.

It’s official: President Wong will be shaking it out with SF State students in a Harlem Shake video this Friday at 2 p.m.

After I wrote a post half-jokingly challenging Dr. Wong (and his fancy Ph.D. in Educational Psychology) to come out of his office and dance among us lowly debt-ridden students, he fired back with a challenge of his own: get 100 tweets with the hashtag #ShakeItWong and he’s there.

Psh, The Swamp doesn’t back down Dr. Wong — we double down. So, we did our best Barney Stinson impression and yelled, “Challenge accepted!”

So yeah, on this President’s day we got the 100 tweets together, but who knew this new guy had so much spunk? Our last President, Robert A. Corrigan, wouldn’t have danced for 1,000 tweets. Maybe this is like that whole new guy on the prison yard type of deal? Wong, who just recently started his job as the 13th SF State president, needs to make an example out of the first guy who tests him — so he is lacing up those dancing shoes.

And so ends the light-hearted story of a college president engaging his new students in a way few others would dare. . .

But wait, what’s that noise off in the distance?

It sounds like… it sounds like it is originating from the third floor of the humanities building. Sssh! Be quiet! If you listen close you can almost still hear the fingers slamming down on keyboards with a fury never before seen in our department. It was an all out TWITTER WAR! Student vs Student, Professor vs Student, Professor vs Professor — nothing and no one was safe! Tweets, private messages, and lengthy emails were flying around like there was no (internet) tomorrow. Lines were crossed, public apologies requested, and Twitter accounts blocked.

Some fake reports that I’m making up right now report that Wong’s upcoming dance moves registered as a 6.4 quake on the Richter scale this morning, being felt almost exclusively in the area between the second and forth floor of the humanities building.

Is it OK for Xpress to tell students to tweet at their president? Can you dance with someone one day and spar with them the next (ex-girlfriends come to mind)? Are Xpress staffers crossing ethical lines by launching a Twitter campaign for the school’s president? Did The Swamp take it too far this time? How good of a dancer do you think Dr. Wong is going to be? Will there be a journalism department next week?

Find out next time on. . . “So you think you can #ShakeItWong?”

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